I've been with the IBM Toronto Center for Advanced Studies since
February, and it's time to make a progress report. What have I done in
the past eight months to create value for them and work on my
research?

My work seemed pretty random in the beginning. I spent a fair bit of
time just getting the feel of IBM, learning about the different
services on IBM's intranet and making sense of the blogosphere. I had
to be told to concentrate several times! ;)

The funny thing is that this random casting-about is probably *just*
what I needed to do. My blog helped me meet other people working in
the space, and I learned about visualizations and resources that I
wouldn't have come across on my own.

The prototype that I made for kicks might be an interesting tool. The
researchers I talked to found it novel…

What's next?

I need to sit down and just build the darn tool. I think it'll take me
two, three weeks for the search engine, maybe another week for the
aggregator. I already have most of the code. November will be my
intensive hacking month, so don't expect to hear much from me externally.

Then I need to test the tool with people so that I have data that I
can write up during my vacation. Early December?

Random Emacs symbol: w3m-url-authinfo – Function: Return a user name and a password to authenticate URL.